A Life Out of the Past

Doctor Carus of Burn Abbey is a Benedictine monk and scholar of the year 1300, with a special interest in the natural sciences, including Alchemy — not just “lead into gold”, but all transformations of substances, including fat into soap, and ore into metal… what we now call Chemistry. Modernly, he is a persona through which scientist and fiction writer Graham J. Darling teaches, demonstrates and reenacts aspects of medieval science and technology with the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), which has accorded him these honours: